Tag Archives: Uncle Jack

Planting Ginny and Jack

Family, People, ,

Aunt Ginny died at the end of 2015, Uncle Jack followed her in 2020. They didn’t want funerals or obituaries. Uncle Jack told me that when he died he wanted his ashes mixed with Aunt Ginny’s and spread on his land in Mississippi. My cousin Joey, with whom the cremains resided for the past several months, said that Uncle Jack wanted their cremains scattered in the waterway in front of their house but Aunt Ginny disagreed because she couldn’t swim. That might be true — but she was actually repeating what her mother, my Grandma Green, said about her ashes.

That is good and all, but sometimes things don’t work out the way one hopes. He didn’t expect that their Trust would have been messed up so much that it took over three years to settle. By that time someone else lived on his property and when Dean and I came into possession of Aunt Ginny and Uncle Jack’s cremains we were reluctant to knock on their door and ask if we could spread their ashes on the property. We also didn’t want to pour them into the waterway because of Aunt Ginny’s request.

While we were still in Mississippi I reached out to Joey to see if he’d be willing to have them on his property, mixed together in a biodegradable urn, planted in the ground with a tree planted over them. Another cousin liked that idea as did my brother but Joey never got back to me. I think he was just happy to be rid of the ashes.

We brought Aunt Ginny and Uncle Jack back home, thinking maybe my brother could bury them on his property beneath a sapling (he wasn’t thrilled), or maybe we could find somewhere in Elgin or South Elgin might allow us to either bury or scatter them.

In the end I bought a kit from The Living Urn and when Clare was in town last month, put the cremains in the ground under a native butterfly bush. We had a small ceremony, played their song, Moon River, and that was that. Like I said on Facebook, it wasn’t what they wanted but it was the best we could do. The Mississippi cousins were neither welcoming nor helpful.

We were married in a cemetery and we now live in one.

Some Old Books

Things, , , ,

More from the Great Knee Wall Cleanout of 2023

Audrey’s Recompense by Mrs. Georgie Sheldon is an example of an American Women’s Dime novel. I’m going to guess that this belonged to my Great Grandmother Jesse Tyler Harris. The copyright is in the late 1800s, so maybe it first belonged to her mother, Jeanette McCornack Tyler. Or perhaps it just ended up at my mom’s house some other way.

It looks like, in the early 1900s a Ralph Victor wrote a series of ten books called Comrades Series for Boys. I have three of them, Comrades on the Great Divide, Comrades on Winton Oval, and Comrades with the Winton Cadets. The were part of the books from my Grandpa Green’s selection, but at least one of them has someone else’s name in it.

My Grandpa Green had quite a few books written by Horatio Alger Jr. I have at least three of them including, Facing the World, Young Salesman, and Five Hundred Dollars.

According to Wikipedia Alger “was an American author who wrote young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through good works. His writings were characterized by the “rags-to-riches” narrative, which had a formative effect on the United States during the Gilded Age.”

Apparently, also according to Wikipedia, Alger was accused of child sexual abuse in 1866 and did not deny the accusations.

Everything about Horatio Alger Jr. is news to me today. I thought the Horatio Alger books were about a boy named Horatio Alger!

Three other books for boys that probably came from my Grandpa’s collection are Lucky the Young Soldier by E. Sherwood, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle by Victor Appleton, and Tex Loses his Temper by Gordon Stewart.

Tex Loses his Temper belonged to my Uncle Richard. I thought this was interesting — his phone number ends with a letter: 2773-J.

The Bobbsey Twins in the Country, surprisingly to me, belonged to my Aunt Ginny’s husband when he was a child. He really never struck me as much of a reader, much less Bobbsey Twins books.